Does Modern Cosmology Prove the Existence of God?

KEVIN HARRIS: Hey, there! You’ve landed on the Reasonable Faith Podcast with Dr. William Lane Craig. I’m your co-host Kevin Harris. You know, we are always looking for the latest developments in cosmology and other sciences that will shed light on the kalam cosmological argument and other topics that Dr. Craig talks about. We’ll bring that to you in a future podcast as always. On today’s podcast we are checking out a blog article from a science writer that specifically addresses the kalam. So, does the article offer anything new or any late-breaking information? You are just going to have to listen and find out. As we connect with Dr. Craig, a quick reminder that now is a good time to bless Reasonable Faith with a financial gift of any size because whatever you give will be doubled up to $300,000. A group of generous donors has agreed to match every dollar you give up to $300,000. This is our annual matching grant opportunity that is going on right now until the end of the year. So please take advantage of it and double your impact. You can give online at ReasonableFaith.org. While you are on the website, if you haven’t done so, be sure you read about the launching of the William Lane Craig Center which will equip students all around the world in the three crucial areas of Christian philosophy, theology, and apologetics. This will enrich the intellectual soil and impact the academy for the Kingdom of God. Your support will help with this amazing endeavor. So please, get the latest info at ReasonableFaith.org, and from the bottom of our hearts thank you for giving.

I found an interesting article, Dr. Craig: “Does Modern Cosmology Prove The Existence of God?”^[1] by Ethan Siegel. Ethan Siegel is a PhD in astrophysics. He's the author of “It Starts With A Bang.” He professes physics and astronomy at various colleges. Have you heard of him, Bill?

DR. CRAIG: No. Actually I hadn't heard the name before. Apparently he's a science journalist that writes for science popularization.

KEVIN HARRIS: The byline of the article says, “The Kalam cosmological argument asserts that everything that exists has a cause, and what caused the Universe? It’s got to be God.” Well, right off the bat he says that the kalam is an assertion that God exists. Haven't you made it clear that the kalam cosmological argument only establishes a cause of the universe and then additional evidence could be presented for God?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I think that his summary was overly simplistic. The argument itself leads to the conclusion, “Therefore, the universe has a cause.” And then you do a conceptual analysis of what it is to be a cause of the universe and several striking properties fall out of such an analysis such as it must be a first, uncaused, beginningless, changeless, timeless, spaceless being of enormous power that is plausibly personal. Now whether you want to call such a being “God” is a matter of indifference to me, but I think that it leads to a being that has the attributes that I just mentioned.

KEVIN HARRIS: The article lists as key takeaways the kalam cosmological argument attempts to argue based on logic and the universe itself that God must exist and must have created it, and then secondly, however, in order to be a compelling argument there must not be any loopholes in any of the premises, assumptions, or steps in the argument. What about that? When is an argument compelling? Is it the same as being airtight?

DR. CRAIG: Normally the word “compelling” would mean that you must rationally assent to it and that anyone who disagrees is thereby convicted of irrationality. And there are virtually no philosophical arguments that are compelling in that sense. Philosophers offer arguments that make their conclusions plausible or perhaps more plausible than not. I think what he really means here is that in order to be a cogent argument or a good argument there mustn't be any loopholes or fallacies in the argument, and that would be a fair statement. But a good argument doesn't need to be rationally compelling. That sets the standard for the cogency of an argument unrealistically high.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next, Siegel says based on what we currently know a universe arising from a Creator is definitely possible but it isn't necessarily mandatory.

We know that everything in the Universe, as it exists today, arose from some pre-existing state that was different from how it is at present. . . . At every step, as we trace our cosmic history back farther and farther, we find that everything that exists or existed had a cause that brought about its existence.

Here's the big “but.”

Can we apply this logical structure to the Universe itself? Since the late 1970s, philosophers and religious scholars — along with a few scientists who also dabble in those arenas — have asserted that we can. Known as the Kalam cosmological argument . . . what, then, is the cause to the Universe’s existence? The answer must be God. That’s the crux of the argument that modern cosmology proves the existence of God. But how well do the premises hold up to scientific scrutiny? Has science proved them, or are other options possible, or even likely? The answer lies not in logic or theological philosophy, but in our scientific knowledge of the Universe itself.

He says the answer is found in scientific knowledge as opposed to logic or theological philosophy. Is he right? Or is his scientism tending to show here?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I think that you're very perceptive. I definitely detect the slight odor of scientism in this comment. It is science and science alone that for Siegel must answer these questions. And of course that's not how the kalam cosmological argument is defended. For me, this is primarily a metaphysical argument. That is to say, it is philosophical in nature, and I present metaphysical reasons for the truth of the first premise and then metaphysical reasons for the truth of the second premise that the universe began to exist. For me, the scientific evidence is simply confirmatory of the conclusion already reached by metaphysical reasoning. And that doesn't need to be compelling. It's quite wrong to say that the claim is that the argument proves the existence of God from modern cosmology. What it's saying is that the evidence of modern cosmology confirms the second premise of the argument that the universe began to exist. It's hard for me to see how anyone can deny that modest claim. Certainly that the premise that the universe began to exist is far more probable given the evidence of contemporary cosmology than it was, say, in the 19th century. Given the evidence for the expansion of the universe and for the thermodynamic properties of the universe it's much more likely that the universe began to exist which is the second premise of the argument. So I think that we mustn't be misled here by scientism into thinking that science and science alone is the arbiter of truth. I see scientific evidence here as confirmatory of the conclusions reached by metaphysical reasoning and argument.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next, Dr. Siegel lists the common litany of examples of things that supposedly violate the first premise. He says quantum physics, Schrodinger's cat, and radioactive decay, and the double-slit experiment. Do any of these show that the first premise is false?

DR. CRAIG: No. None of these is a proven counter-example to the claim that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Even on indeterministic theories of quantum physics –   these concern events, and I carefully formulated the first premise so that it does not say every “event” has a cause. I wanted to avoid these sorts of alleged counter-examples. Rather it is everything that begins to exist has a cause. Something cannot come into being without a cause. And I give metaphysical arguments for that first premise. These examples that he gives are not proven counter-examples to that premise. There are fully deterministic theories of quantum mechanics according to which everything has a cause, even every event. So the skeptic has to prove that an indeterministic interpretation of these theories is correct, and that can't be done because the deterministic and indeterministic interpretations are empirically equivalent.

KEVIN HARRIS: I can tell that he's been reading you because he anticipates the Copenhagen Interpretation and what you just said. Let me read what he says here. He says,

You might argue, and some do, that the Copenhagen Interpretation isn’t the only way to make sense of the Universe, and that there are other interpretations of quantum mechanics that are completely deterministic. While this is true, it’s also not a compelling argument; the viable interpretations of quantum mechanics are all observationally indistinguishable from one another, meaning they all have an equal claim to validity.

You've pointed out that there are as many as ten different interpretations of quantum mechanics. Siegel's saying here that this makes no difference. It's not a compelling argument. What's he saying?

DR. CRAIG: His statement that the viable interpretations of quantum mechanics are all observationally indistinguishable from one another meaning they all have an equal claim to validity entails that deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics have an equal claim to validity. Therefore this is not a proven counter-example to the first premise that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Remember, and I reiterate, we've offered two metaphysical arguments in support of that causal premise, and that cannot then be refuted just by saying, “Well, maybe quantum events don't have a cause.” The objective here needs to prove his counter-example, and I think that Siegel undermines his own counter-example by saying that deterministic interpretations have an equal claim to validity in which case the counter-example has not been proved.

KEVIN HARRIS: Up next in the article, he says,

Did the Universe begin to exist? This one is, believe it or not, even more dubious that the prior assertion. Whereas we can imagine that there is some fundamentally deterministic, non-random, cause-and-effect obeyed reality underlying what we observe as the bizarre and counterintuitive quantum world, it’s very difficult to conclude that the Universe itself must have begun to exist at some point.

“But what about the Big Bang?”

Isn’t it true that our Universe began with a hot Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago?

Kind of. Yes, it’s definitely true that we can trace the history of our Universe back to an early, hot, dense, uniform, rapidly expanding state. It’s true that we call that state the hot Big Bang, and have for generations. But what’s not true, and hasn’t been true for some 40+ years, is the notion that the Big Bang is the beginning of space, time, energy, the laws of physics, and everything that we know and experience. The Big Bang wasn’t the beginning, but was rather preceded by a completely different state known as cosmic inflation.

Is this accurate?

DR. CRAIG: This is, I think, rather dated information. I was a little surprised to see Siegel appealing to inflationary cosmology to try to subvert the second premise. As he says, inflation has been around for decades, and he seems to think that the defenders of the kalam cosmological argument have just been standing still when in fact we've been keeping abreast with developments in astrophysics and cosmology as the science continues to progress. So when he says the Big Bang wasn't the beginning of the universe, he's defining the term “Big Bang” not to go all the way back to the beginning but to refer simply to that post-inflationary expansion. In the original inflationary models between 10 to the negative 35 and 10 to the negative 33 second there was this super rapid or inflationary expansion of the universe which then settled down to the more leisurely expansion that we observe today. But the development in modern cosmology has been that despite the attempt of inflationary theorists to extend inflation to the infinite past, it turns out that that can't be done. Inflation can be extended infinitely into the future, but it cannot be extended infinitely into the past. The theorem that was developed in 2003 by Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin was specifically developed to refute these past eternal inflationary models. So I find it a little odd that Siegel would be appealing to these. As I say, his article is rather dated. He's not even talking here about quantum cosmology which is the more current discussion. He leaves aside these quantum cosmological models simply to appeal to inflation.

KEVIN HARRIS: I'm curious about something. You and I have been talking about these subjects on the podcast for over 10 years. You've been working on the kalam for decades. But article after article after article seems to be dated, seems to say the same thing. I mean, in the most popular blogs and science journals they say the same thing that you've been addressing forever. They always bring up Schrodinger's cat or quantum mechanics, the double-slit experiment, all of these things. I’ve always wondered: is there anything new coming down the pike? Has it been that stable for so long – Big Bang cosmology – that there really isn't a lot new?

DR. CRAIG: I wonder myself as to why these folks present these outdated objections. I can only conclude that they're not reading my or others’ current work. I suspect they've seen a debate on YouTube and think that that's all there is to the argument. They don't seem to realize that people like Alex Vilenkin continue to work on this topic all the time. Over and over again I think the conclusion that the universe began to exist has been confirmed by the scientific evidence.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's what he says next. He gives some evidences for cosmic inflation, then he says,

That same logic can be applied to the past: that same amount of time ago, whatever we had was half of what we had now. Take another, equivalent timestep backwards, and it’s halved once again. But no matter how many times you halve and halve and halve whatever you had initially, it will never reach zero. That’s what inflation teaches us: our Universe, for as long as inflation went on, can only get smaller, but can never reach a size of zero or a time that can be identified as a beginning.

This is the Zeno's paradoxes fallacy. Does it commit that?

DR. CRAIG: I think it is. The fact is that if you go back, say, halfway in one minute then you go back half again in 30 seconds then half again in 15 seconds you will arrive at the beginning in two minutes. That's mathematically demonstrable. I think that the fallacy here that Siegel commits is that he assumes that having a beginning entails having a beginning point. Again, I've denied that and argued against it in my written work. The series of fractions diminishing in size, for example, has no beginning fraction – no smallest fraction – but it has a limit at the point zero. In exactly the same way, whether or not the universe shrinks down to a singularity is irrelevant. The point is that you reach a beginning of the universe before which the universe did not exist. There was no universe 14.5 billion years ago. There wasn't even a point in time 14.5 billion years ago. You come to an absolute beginning of time and space, and that need not be a singular point. In order to have a beginning the universe doesn't have to have a beginning point.

KEVIN HARRIS: He does anticipate that one will cite the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem. He says,

There are numerous loopholes in this theorem as well: if you reverse the arrow of time, the theorem fails; if you replace the law of gravity with a specific set of quantum gravitational phenomena, the theorem fails; if you construct an eternally inflating steady-state Universe, the theorem fails.

So, is it still viable to quote the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem?

DR. CRAIG: Of course it is, and Vilenkin has responded to all of these attempts to evade the theorem's implications. Our listeners need to understand that this theorem is extremely general. It has only one condition to it, and that is that the universe has on average been expanding throughout its history. If that single condition is fulfilled then the universe cannot be past eternal. The attempts to avert this are desperate measures that in many cases are non-physical (they can't be physically realized) and often imply the very beginning of the universe that they sought to avoid. Take for example his first so-called loophole – namely that you reverse the arrow of time. That is to say, as you go back in time you reach a point at which the arrow of time flips over and begins to run in the opposite direction. Now, that would avert the theorem but that's utterly non-physical. The idea that time can run backwards is non-physical. In any case, it doesn't avoid the beginning of the universe because that mirror universe is in no sense in our past. Rather, what you have there are two universes with a common beginning point, one expanding in one direction, the other expanding in the other direction. So, in fact, this idea of the time reversal doesn't avoid the beginning of the universe at all. It actually implies a beginning of the universe. This has been the pattern over and over again with these exotic models that try to evade that single very general condition that the theorem presupposes.

KEVIN HARRIS: We're at the conclusion of the article. He says, “Therefore, the Universe has a cause, and that cause is God?” He's talking about the kalam at this point. He says,

That is only defensible if you define God as “that which caused the Universe to come into existence from a state of non-existence.” Here are some examples that show why this is absurd.

* When we simulate a two-dimensional Universe on a computer, did we bring that Universe into existence, and are we, therefore, the God(s) of that Universe?

I don't know anybody who defines God that way.

DR. CRAIG: It's a red herring or a straw man perhaps to say. The argument does not define God as that which caused the universe to come into existence. Rather, as I indicated before, one can deduce the properties that a cause of the universe must have, and you find that it leads to a first, uncaused, beginningless, changeless, timeless, spaceless, enormously powerful, immaterial, personal creator of the universe. All of those attributes need to be argued for, but I think I can successfully do so. So it is not true that one simply infers that because the universe has a cause that that cause is God. One argues for the specific properties that a transcendent cause of space and time must possess. Here, again, if I just might reiterate it, here again the philosophical or metaphysical arguments for the premises come crucially into play. When you're talking about the attributes of this transcendent cause of the universe, you're not doing science. You're doing metaphysics, and it will only be on a narrow, and I think ultimately self-defeating, scientism that this kind of approach to philosophical questions would be outlawed.

KEVIN HARRIS: Finally he says,

The most important takeaway, however, is this: in any scientific endeavor, you absolutely cannot begin from the conclusion you hope to reach and work backwards from there. . . . you have to formulate your assertions in such a way that they can be scrutinized, tested, and either validated or falsified. In particular, you cannot posit an unprovable assertion and then claim you have “proved” the existence of something by deductive reasoning. If you cannot prove the premise, all logical reasoning predicated upon that premise is unsubstantiated. . . .

Unless we can firmly establish many things that have yet to be demonstrated, the Kalam cosmological argument will only convince those who already agree with its unproven conclusions.

Bill, your response?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I would say the very fact that in this blog he has examined the premises, he has scrutinized them, tested them, and attempted to either validate or falsify them, show that we are offering meaningful premises and not just begging the question. I've given three arguments in support of the first premise, four arguments in support of the second premise, and I think these arguments have yet to be refuted, and that therefore we have good grounds for thinking both of the premises are, in fact, true and that therefore the conclusion follows.

KEVIN HARRIS: I just want to say to all the science writers out there. You guys, write something with some good updated material and we might do a podcast on it.^[2]